Ed Batista

Technology is Soft

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen and that you see opportunities to help your organization or your community find better ways of doing things, particularly when technology is a factor.

So here's a mental model to help make the process of leading change easier: Technology is soft.

Let me make a brief detour in order to explain what I mean by that.  In the late 1970s Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos developed a framework for analyzing organizations known as the "7s Model" which looks at different aspects of an organization and which I still find highly useful.  (The graphic at left is from BuildingBrands.)  The 7s Model is often interpreted as dividing organizations into "hard" and "soft" elements--the former category includes the three concepts in red at the top of the graphic:

• Strategy
Your high-level goals and how you plan to achieve them.

• Structure
An organization's "blueprints": how people and resources are allocated, how work and responsibilities are distributed.

• Systems
All the ropes, pulleys and gears, so to speak, that get things done in an organization.

These elements of the model are seen as "hard" because they're more easily reduced to tangible artifacts--plans and documents and infrastructure--but that designation also reflects a value judgment in our language.  "Hard" stuff can be complex and difficult, but it's also serious and important.  "Soft" stuff, in contrast, is ambiguous, unreliable, secondary.  (I hope it's apparent that I think this is bias needs to be challenged, and Tom Peters agrees.)

We've traditionally located technology among the "hard" elements of an organization, and that's what usually comes to mind when we think about "Information Technology."  We have IT plans, IT departments (or people whose responsibilities include IT), and, of course, IT systems.  Thinking about technology from this perspective may seem logical, but I believe the implications are profound, unhelpful and increasingly outdated.

Some aspects of technology will always be classic "IT": hardware, storage, connectivity.  But these are commodities.  You get the best price you can for them, and you don't expect them to add strategic value to the organization.

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the "soft" side:

• Staff
Not the org chart--that's part of the Structure--but the real, flesh-and-blood people, and all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and aspirations.

• Style
Management style, or organizational culture: The tacit norms that govern how work gets done and how people interact.

• Skills
The full range of competencies possessed by an organization, including interpersonal skills, learning.

Thinking about technology as "soft," as an aspect of an organization's staff, style and skills, may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly this is where it truly resides (and it's where you'll have the greatest leverage when driving technology-related change.)

Let me illustrate this approach with an story from my work at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:  As a Leadership Coach at the Center for Leadership Development and Research, I'm a member of a team with many interdependent sub-teams that often collaborate virtually on long-term projects involving multiple sets of stakeholders.  When I started at the beginning of 2007, the tools available to support these collaborations were 1) email and 2) shared network drives.  These tools met our most basic needs, but they were hardly optimal, and we found ourselves frustrated with their limitations.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce a wiki, and as the unofficial techie on our staff of executive coaches and organizational development consultants, I was in a position to make that change happen.  But in retrospect I can see that I focused on the "hard" elements of the 7s Model.  I developed a strategic IT plan that included a wiki, I explored in great detail how the wiki would be used and how it would fit into our existing organizational structure, and I spent a good bit of time exploring various wiki platforms to find the best system to meet our needs.

I was able to get it up and running, but adoption by my non-technical colleagues was hit-or-miss.  Some people loved it, but others found it confusing or didn't really understand how  it was an improvement over email.  I think part of the problem was the language I used to introduce it.  I'd say, "I have a new system that'll help us collaborate more effectively."   Well, when you say "new," people hear "change," and they realize that means "more work," at least in the short run.  And when you say "system," people  hear "IT," and they know that means, "someone else's responsibility."  So when you say "new system," what people really hear is "more work that shouldn't be my responsibility in the first place."   Not exactly an appealing message.

So as we were about to begin a new academic year last Fall, I took a new approach.  I stopped worrying about the strategic IT plan--I didn't even update it.  I stopped thinking about how the wiki fit into our organizational structure.  And with the system already in place, I didn't have any technical work to do at all.

Instead, I starting thinking about the "soft" side of the organization.  I thought about my colleagues as individuals.  What were they like?  What were their needs?  How did they work?

I thought about our organizational culture.  Although Stanford has a certain culture, and the business school has yet another culture all its own, the Center where I work is a small, informal, entrepreneurial place where we can't do things by the book because it hasn't been written yet.

I thought about our collective skills--not just (or even primarily) technical skills, but our interpersonal skills.  How do we connect with each other?  How do we collaborate?

So rather than asking my colleagues to conform to a "hard" plan, I began asking how "soft" technology like a wiki could conform to them.  And rather than trying to "train" them on this new system, I began having a series of short conversations--sometimes just 5 minutes--about how they were working and what they were doing.  I took advantage of every small opportunity to help people think about the wiki as an integrated element in our organizational culture, and as an extension of their collaborative skills.

Today, just a few months later, we're the most intensive wiki users in the business school, and we're probably among the most intensive non-technical wiki users in the entire university.  I had to lay the "hard" groundwork to initiate the project, but my sustained focus on the strategic plan, the structure, and the system actually delayed our progress, and the wiki's ultimate success is directly related to its integration with the organization's "soft" side.

The 7th circle at the center of the 7s Model represents Shared Values, the commonly-held aspirations that give an organization a collective spirit, a sense of mission.  And if you value the effective use of technology, and you want your organization to adopt and embody that value, I encourage you to remember this the next time you're seeking to promote change: Technology is soft.

Photo by fotologic.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

7s Model graphic by BuildingBrands.

This post was adapted from remarks I made on May 12, 2008, to the second graduating class of ZeroDivide Fellows.  Congratulations and good luck to all the past and current Fellows, and thanks to ZeroDivide for having me.

Double-Loop Learning

A number of people wind up here after searching for "double-loop learning," a topic I've addressed before while discussing meta-work, executive coaching and feedback, so I thought I'd provide a simple graphic overview.  (Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint file of the images below, 64 KB.)

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Most learning can be described as "single-loop."  We start with a set of goals, values and strategies that yield results.  We assess the results, refine our techniques, and try again.  One loop.

But our goals, values and strategies rest on a set of underlying assumptions that are implicit and unchallenged.  Single-loop learning can help us pursue a goal more effectively by altering our methods, but it doesn't help us determine whether the goal is worth pursuing in the first place.

As I wrote in 2006...

In most circumstances, the learning we undertake is aimed at improving our performance relative to a set of goals and other factors that are taken for granted. Feedback from our performance (or "learning from our mistakes") typically cycles immediately back into our analysis of the strategies, tactics or techniques that led to our performance. This is important work, but it's inherently limited by those initial factors that are taken for granted at the outset and that remain unchallenged by an assessment of the performance results.

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Double-loop learning occurs when we expand the analytical frame to explicitly identify and then challenge any underlying assumptions that support our stated goals, values and strategies.

Rather than only ask, "How can we achieve our goals more effectively?", we look deeper and also ask...

• What assumptions support our goals, values and strategies?
• How can we test these assumptions?
• Having tested these assumptions, should we change our goals, values or strategies?

Again, as I wrote in 2006...

In contrast, if we can pull back and expand the frame of our analysis, we begin to call into question some of the factors that we usually take for granted. Our performance results aren't simply used to assess the strategies that have been derived from those factors--they question the factors themselves.

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I realize that this can seem somewhat abstract, so it may be useful to refer to the posts mentioned above, which discuss double-loop learning in the context of meta-work, executive coaching and feedback. I've also found Mark Smith's essay on double-loop learning at Informal Education extremely valuable.

And continued thanks to Chris Argyris, who first developed the concept of double-loop learning, and whose thoughts on theories of action and organizational learning inform my own work on a daily basis.

Organizational Effectiveness

What makes organizations effective?  For that matter, what do we even mean by effectiveness?  I've been giving these questions some thought recently and the following graphs are the result.  (Here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file, 75 KB.)

I love the Peters/Waterman/McKinsey "7s" Model, but we can extend it in two directions.  First, looking within an organization, if we reduce the model further and boil it down to its most essential core elements, I think we're left with People (or Staff, in 7s-speak) and Culture (an amalgam of Style, Skills and Shared Values.)  Second, if we look beyond the organization--if we ask why it exists and whether its fulfilling its purpose--we begin to assess its Impact, which includes not only profitability and financial sustainability but also the value created for any stakeholders, from a business's employees to a nonprofit's clients.

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My focus on these three elements is also due to their tightly interrelated nature--they all affect the other two in fundamental ways.

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I think one of the least-understood dynamics is the relationship that exists between an organization's people and its culture.  Sometimes it's difficult to even know where to draw a boundary between the two: Where do I stop and where do my contributions to the culture around me begin?  This may be why so many organizations operate without a clear understanding of their culture.  (And to be clear, every organization has a culture: "When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...")

But what's most important to recognize is the dialectical nature of this relationship.  An organization's founders create the initial culture, which then exerts its influence on them in turn.  Future colleagues are attracted to the pre-existing culture because in some way it meets their needs, and so they reinforce it.

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I've also focused on People and Culture because I see these elements as most closely connected to an organization's Impact.  This isn't to say that other elements don't matter--but ultimately people implement an organization's plans, and the culture in which they operate helps them or hinders them.  Talented people can overcome misguided strategies and suboptimal systems, but they can't outrun a dysfunctional culture (not for long, anyway.)

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And an organization's Impact--its ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its purpose and create value for stakeholders--directly affects its ability to attract and retain effective people and to build and sustain a high-performance culture.

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OK, having mapped out the relationships that exist among these three elements, what do they actually look like?  How do we define People, Culture and Impact in effective organizations?

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Here's my definition of effectiveness as it pertains to People.  I emphasize connections with Culture and Impact; interpersonal skills and accountability; self-development and growth.

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Here's my definition of an effective Culture.  I emphasize distributed leadership, continuous learning, openness, and decentralization.  The final quote from Tom Peters deserves further explanation: The 7s Model is sometimes divided into "Hard" elements (Strategy, Structure and Systems) and "Soft" elements (Skills, Staff, Style and Shared Values).  Our business culture tends to value the former and dismiss the latter, and Peters thinks this is entirely ass-backwards.  The "hard" stuff, from strategic plans to complex financial structures, is actually pretty fuzzy and surprisingly easy to fake.  The "soft" stuff--relationships, leadership, interpersonal skills (in short, culture)--is actually pretty resilient and surprisingly difficult to get right.  Hard is soft, soft is hard.

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I don't believe there's a universal definition of Impact--organizations define value-creation in different ways, and they're answerable to different sets of stakeholders.  But I do believe that effective organizations share the characteristics listed above, which enable them to understand, measure and communicate their impact, and to use that information to drive decision-making (cf. Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts.)  At the same time, they reality-check regularly and don't let data dictate decisions.

Effective organizations also know when to give up and move on.  They take a pragmatic approach and never let sunk costs fuel persistence--instead, they've mastered the art of strategic quitting.

Finally, effective organizations have a vision of victory that they're driving toward.  What would it look like to win?  For some organizations (including many nonprofits), ultimate victory means putting themselves out of business because they've succeeded in fully and permanently meeting the need that they were created to fulfill.

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Again, if you're interested, here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file (75 KB).  As with the other models I post here, I consider this a work-in-progress that helps me make sense of the world, and I welcome any feedback to improve it or make it clearer.

Scott Ginsberg on Asking Questions

What kinds of questions do you usually ask people?  We're often drawn to yes/no questions--they're simple and direct.  But when simplicity and directness aren't our only goals, yes/no questions can be problematic.  They surface a minimum of new information because they don't invite the other person into a dialogue and they constrain the boundaries of the conversation.

When we do move beyond yes/no questions, we tend ask why? questions, such as "Why did you do that?" or "Why did you do it that way?"  But why? questions can be heard as "What the hell were you thinking?" and provoke defensiveness.

In the Leadership Coaching class I'm involved with at Stanford, we encourage our students to ask questions that are designed to get the other person actively involved.  Such questions can be challenging and even blunt, but they're also open-ended and compel the other person to reflect before answering.

Scott Ginsberg recently posted a list of 62 useful questions, along with a one-line explanation of why they work.  It's an incredible resource, and I encourage you to read the whole thing, but as I expect to refer back to it regularly, here are the 20 I found most valuable:

10. How are you creating…?
Proves that someone has a choice.

13. How could you have…?
Focused on past performance improvement.

14. How do you feel…?
Feelings are good.

16. How do you plan to…?
Future oriented, process oriented, action oriented.

17. How do you want…?
Visualizes ideal conditions.

18. How does this relate to…?
Keeps someone on point, uncovers connections between things.

19. How else could this be…?
Encourages open, option-oriented and leverage-based thinking.

23. How might you…?
All about potential and possibility.

27. How much time…?
Identifies patterns of energy investment.

28. How often do you…?
Gets an idea of someone’s frequency.

29. How well do you…?
Uncovers abilities.

30. How will you know when/if…?
Predicts outcomes of ideal situations.

31. If you could change…?
Visualizes improvement.

34. If you stopped…?
Cause-effect question.

37. Is anybody going to…?
Deciding if something even matters.

49. What are you doing that…?
Assesses present actions.

50. What are you willing to…?
Explores limits.

53. What can you do right now…?
Focuses on immediate action being taken.

57. What did you learn…?
Because people don’t care what you know; only what you learned.

60. What else can you…?
Because there’s always options.

Notice the structure of these questions.  They're almost all how? or what? questions, which encourage the other person to take a moment and look inside before answering.  They can certainly be challenging--"What can you do right now?" is hardly a softball--but they're also non-judgmental, which minimizes any defensiveness.  Perhaps most important, they're not leading--they don't suggest that there's a "right" answer--which encourages the other person to answer thoughtfully and honestly, rather than framing an answer to please you.  Many thanks to Scott for sharing his insights.

Photo by Erik Charlton.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Three Questions with Mark McGuinness

Mark McGuinness is an executive coach based in London who specializes in working with artists and creative professionals and who writes regularly at Wishful Thinking.  He's also the most tech-savvy coach I know, and he's found a number of innovative ways to integrate technology with his interpersonal work.  As another fan of technology who happened to spend two years in art school as an undergrad, I was thrilled when Mark agreed to do a Three Questions interview with me--thanks, Mark!

1) You describe yourself as "a poet and a business coach," but which came first? Were you writing when you saw an unmet need for coaching among artists and creative professionals, or did you begin to write as a form of personal expression to complement your coaching practice?

Poetry came first. And it will last longest. I never planned on being a coach, I just wanted to write poetry. I got interested in hypnosis as a way of tapping into creativity, and as I like to do things properly I trained as a hypnotherapist. I found myself being consulted by writers who were stuck on their latest novel and actors with stage nerves - they were great fun to work with, and of all the clients I worked with they seemed to get the most out of the sessions. So I started looking for ways of working with more artists and creatives, and developing it as a niche. Most of them weren't really looking for therapy, just a way of kick-starting their creativity, so I started offering professional coaching instead of therapy.

After a few years another coach invited me to do some work with him at Vodafone, which introduced me to the world of coaching in business. One assignment led to another and I ended up doing a lot of work with various organisations, mostly helping managers to become better coaches for their teams. After a few years of that, I decided to put the creative and business coaching together and focus on companies in the creative industries - advertisting, marketing, TV, computer games, web development etc.

I felt reasonably confident of my coaching skills, having been doing it for around 10 years, but I wanted to get more of a sense of the big picture of the industry sector. So I took the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at the Unversity of Warwick, which was a fantastic course - we studied the usual core business topics like strategy, marketing and organisation theory, alongside intellectual property law, theories of creativity and theories of the creative economy. A great mixture of inspiration and business knowledge, that made me look at my business and my poetry in a different light.

2) Your recent e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams does a great job of explaining coaching, but I'm also curious about how working with your particular clientele affects your approach. What do you think you might do differently as a coach because of your focus on creative people?

Well two things I might do differently are not to wear a suit and not to call myself a coach! It's probably no surprise that creative types don't feel comfortable with suits, but I discovered through my work and via my MA research dissertation that a lot of people in creative businesses really don't like the word 'coaching'. They associate it with corporate management-speak, so the image doesn't work for them at all. But when we get down to work, the label doesn't matter, we're too absorbed in looking at the situation and finding new options.

Image aside, a lot of what I do with my creative industries clients is no different to what I would do with any other client. People are people after all. There are a lot of issues around communication, collaboration, teamwork, management and generally dealing with other people that are the same, whatever industry you're working in.

The obvious area that is different is working on the creative process, which we can approach from several different angles. Sometimes we focus on fine-tuning creative thinking strategies. Sometimes people have difficulty getting into the right state of mind for creative flow, so with my background in hypnotherapy I can help them find the right triggers for a particular emotional state. Time management doesn't sound like a particularly creative topic, but I show people that if you don't manage your workload it can play havoc with your creativity. Other times we might focus on the craft element - using your critical faculty to appraise and revise your work. And for me the creative process doesn't end until you've reached an audience with your work, so sometimes we're focused on presenting it to others (boss, client, public) in an engaging way.

Another nice thing about working with creatives is sharing what I've learned from my own practice as a poet. I find that a lot of clients are quite intrigued by poetry, so it can be very fruitful to look for the common ground between poetry and graphic design or singing opera or writing a film script or whatever it happens to be. Clients seem to find that helpful and it's fascinating for me - I get a window on all these creative worlds that I can never enter properly, but I can have a look inside as a visitor and see some of the amazing things people are doing.

3) One of the reasons I've enjoyed your work is your effective use of technology--photos from Flickr, a Facebook group, a Tumblr link blog, prominent links to your feed, etc.  I wish more people in the field did the same, but I know that many coaches and consultants are daunted by the prospect.  How do you decide which new tools are worth using, and how do you implement and support them?

I discovered blogging by reading Seth Godin's e-book Who's There? (PDF, 2MB) and it was such an exciting idea there wasn't a decision to make - I was going to do this and I was prepared to learn all the techy stuff I needed to get it up and running. So I immersed myself in the blogging world out of sheer enthusiasm, reading sites like ProBlogger and CopyBlogger and devouring what they were teaching.

A lot of the other tools came about by seeing cool things on other people's blogs and thinking 'How do they do that?' and investigating from there. These days time is a big factor for me. E.g. I wanted to do a links blog for a while but looked around for something that wouldn't add to my workload. I was already bookmarking pages on Delicious, so I wanted a Firefox extension that would allow me to simultaneously post to Delicious, my Tumblr links blog and StumbleUpon - I found the Mahalo share extension [for Firefox] which does a great job. It means I'm creating a whole new blog without any extra work - result!  [On a related note, see Mark's e-book on Time Management for Creative People.]

If you're thinking of taking the plunge with blogging and social media, the key thing to remember is that it's not about technology, it's about people. That's why they call it social media - the tools are designed to connect people and they do a great job, I've met loads of great people since I started blogging, and the tools are getting more user-friendly as they develop.

Bonus Personal Question: Your first New Year's Resolution for 2008 was maintaining a daily meditation practice.  How's it going?

So far so good! I've settled into a rhythm of meditating first thing in the morning for 15-20 minutes and now it feels like the normal thing to do. I'll admit there have been a few days I really didn't feel like sitting, but I found myself thinking 'Well, you promised your readers you would do it - what are you going to tell them?'. And sat down. So there you have it - the power of blogging!

Joel Peterson on Organizational Culture

Joel Peterson, Vice-Chair of JetBlue, investor and serial entrepreneur, spoke on organizational culture at the Conference on Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few weeks ago:

When you think about topics to talk to entrepreneurs about, culture is one of the last ones you typically think about, because you're in the business of getting something started, it's chaotic [and] the last thing you're thinking about is culture-building.  It's just the most irrelevant topic...and I'm going to try to convince you that it's not as irrelevant as you think.  I was teaching a similar...course a few years back, and I...called on one of the entrepreneurs in the audience and asked him about culture, and he said, "We don't have any culture in our business..."  Well, you have a culture.  When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...  The question is: Do you want to influence it or not?  Do you really want to have a hand in shaping it or not?  You are going to have it, either inadvertently or with some planning and some forethought.

I imagine few readers of this site need to be convinced about the importance of organizational culture, but it's still inspiring to hear a financial heavyweight like Peterson make the case.  (I took a class with Peterson as a student at the GSB, and I've written twice before about thought-provoking concepts that I took away from his lectures.)

The Value of Journal Writing

Most of the work I do as an executive coach (particularly at Stanford) involves asking clients and students to keep a journal.  In some cases this is a structured (and graded!) class assignment, and several times a year my academic duties include reading and commenting on students' journals while they're taking our experiential "Interpersonal Dynamics" class.  But even if someone's journal is just a series of informal, private notes, the purpose is to insure that the learning doesn't stop at the end of the coaching session or the class exercise.

My empirical experience as a journal-reader, as a coach working with journal-writers, and as an occasional journal-keeper myself has convinced me of the value of this practice, and this fits with my conceptual understanding of experiential learning cycles.  But I'm still left wondering why it actually works: What are the underlying processes that make journal writing a meaningful activity?

The work of neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux suggests some answers.  Ledoux's work has focused on memory, emotions and cognition, and he talked about memory with the Edge "World Question Center":

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.

So journaling 1) compels us to access our memories of an experience, 2) creates another, more recent memory of that experience, and 3) creates a physical record of those memories to which we can return in the future.

But Ledoux's work on emotion and cognition suggests an even more powerful reason for the value of journaling.  A key theme for Ledoux is the distinction between emotional memories, which he defined in an Edge interview with John Brockman as "implicit, or procedural memories that are in the brain's systems, but not reflected in consciousness" and cognitive, or explicit, memories, which he defined as "the kind of memory we usually have in mind when we use the word memory in everyday speech."

Some coaching sessions and experiential learning activities evoke intense emotions in the participants, but as Ledoux told Brockman...

[T]he brain can produce emotional responses in us that have very little to do with what we think we're dealing with or talking about or thinking about at the time. In other words, emotional reactions can be elicited independent of our conscious thought processes. For example, we've found pathways that take information into the amygdala without first going through the neocortex, which is where you need to process it in order to figure out exactly what it is and be conscious of it. So, emotions can be and, in fact, probably are mostly processed at an unconscious level. We become conscious and aware of all this after the fact.

So journaling after emotional experiences allows us to process them when we can understand them cognitively and (in some cases) consciously for the first time.

But, of course, many otherwise valuable coaching sessions and experiential learning activities don't evoke strong emotions; is it helpful to journal in these cases as well?  Again, Ledoux's work suggests that it is.  From an interview with Ledoux conducted by the Dana Foundation:

There is both an upside and a downside to the fact that emotional states make memories stronger. The upside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones. The downside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones.

So journaling after non-emotional experiences bolsters our memories of these experiences and helps to insure that they're not lost among our more powerful and long-lasting emotional memories.

One final thought--Ledoux also discussed with Brockman the potent and even destructive power of emotional memories:

Many people have problems with their emotional memories; psychologists' offices are filled with people who are basically trying to take care of and alter emotional memories, get rid of them, hold them in check.

I'd never suggest that journal-writing is a substitute for psychological care, but I do wonder if the experience of cognitively processing emotional memories in a journal entry might have some transformative power, allowing us not only to better understand those memories but also to better manage and make use of them.

(Perhaps surprisingly, given my general fondness for technology, I'm a big fan of journaling with pen and paper.  The downsides are manifest--not searchable, not archivable, and the stuff does tend to pile up.  But the upside is that it's a lot less tempting to edit and re-write, and I just get my thoughts out and move on.  A sentence today is worth a page tomorrow.   I'm not picky about pens--I prefer cheap blue Bics--but I truly love Moleskine notebooks.)

Thanks to Mark Oehlert for refererring me to Ledoux in the first place. Photos by Del Far and culture.culte.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Grant McCracken on the Elements of Reinvention

When we sit down to make change happen, when we seek to reinvent our organizations (and ourselves), what dynamics characterize that process?

Grant McCracken has come up with a short list based on his recent work on a "reinvention exercise" with "a large American corporation."  I intend to refer back to this regularly in my own work, so I'm pulling out the key phrases that caught my attention, but you really should read the whole thing:

1. Furiously Framing and Reframing

...a really liquid kind of problem solving.  We are are framing and reframing and reframing yet again...until the wisdom of this little crowd becomes apparent.

2. Tagging

Vivid pictures and phrases get the job done...  Good ideas have no hope of surviving to maturity and adoption unless (or until) they are well tagged.

3. Pattern Migration

There are wonderful moments when someone will say, "look, here's something we know about this context.  I wonder if we could transfer this to another problem set."

4. Scaling Up, Scaling Down

At one moment, we were dealing with the biggest possible problem sets in the broadest possible ways.  The next, we have zeroed down to a very particular problem.

5. Messier Models

We saw people insisting on messier models in order to honor some of the messiness in the world in the model.  The bigger point to make here is that as the world gets messier, more multiple, more various and changeable, discourse about change is beginning to take on these structural properties.

6. Acknowledging Fear

For the first time, I saw people building models of process that acknowledge the emotional difficulties inherent in the change making process.  Everyone always feels the pain of entertaining new ideas and having to give up old verities, but this used to be a very private condition.  Now people are openly acknowledging it.

7. New Language like "Chunking"

When problem sets are really messing and heard to read, "chunking" is useful.  It's a way of saying let's call this [thing] a something. Because we are chunking we are not obliged to say or to know what it means.  We are just saying "there's something here we need to look at."

8. Porousness

People are now prepared to acknowledge that the corporation is no longer a free standing, discrete entity.  It is customary to hear people dealing with the fact that the corporation has loose boundaries.

Grant's conclusion after coming up with this list?

All of these new intellectual inclinations and practices suggest I think that the corporation is learning to live with dynamism by learning how to practice dynamism.

Three of these dynamics jump out at me and seem closely intertwined: tagging, messier models, and acknowledging fear.  Grant's reference to the importance of tagging ideas reminds me of Howard Gardner's emphasis on "representational redescriptions" in the influence process:

A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other...

"Messy models" reminds me of Pema Chödrön's embrace of imperfection:

[T]rying to tie up all the loose ends and get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.  There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride... Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

And I'm particularly struck by Grant's inclusion of fear as a key factor to be addressed (or at least acknowledged) in any reinvention or change management process.  (He goes a step further and references any "emotional difficulty" in the text, but I agree that "fear" made for a better headline.)  Our inability to sense, legitimize and express our emotions in the workplace creates a huge gap between our collective and our individual experiences. For example, I'm scared or angered by your proposal, but I can't effectively communicate those feelings at work, so you never truly understand my position--and we're left wondering why we make so little progress!

A link I see among these three dynamics is an acceptance of the fact that our brains work in ways that are often described as "irrational" (or at the very least run counter to many notions of rationality):

Ideas stick when they're made vivid and colorful--and even the best ideas will die if not made sticky.

The world is messy and complicated--and models that incorporate the mess are actually more useful to us than reductive, straightforward ones.

And we're scared and angry--a lot!--and pretending those feelings aren't there doesn't make them go away.

Much of my work as a coach and group facilitator involves helping people better understand and express feelings that typically get ignored in a professional setting, and Grant's observations suggest to me that this is precisely what we need to do more of when we're involved in any change-making process.

Logrolling: I encourage you to pre-order Grant's new book, which is due out in May, but be warned that I consider him a friend and an inspiration.

Photo by Pop!Tech 2004. © All rights reserved.

William James on Experiential Learning

A few months ago I read Robert Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, and I'm still absorbing the lessons to be learned from this incredibly rich intellectual biography.  In the book's penultimate chapter, Richardson quotes from James's Some Problems of Philosophy:

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

The profound meaning of this quote for me is rooted in the fact that my work hinges upon the unique ability of experiential learning to expand both our self-awareness and our behavioral repertoire, and (by extension) upon the inability of conventional modes of instruction to achieve the same results.  Richardson continues:

For this aspect of his later thinking, James has been called anti-intellectual.  A better description of his real position would be anti-abstraction; best would be to recognize it as the culmination of a lifelong protest on behalf of experience.  This is not a new position for James, of course.  It is the same clear opposition to Plato, who denigrates perceptual knowledge as mere sense impressions, and contrasts them with ideas, which are true and eternal.  Jame's life work had been to reverse this polarity, to answer Plato.

From Wikipedia (as of today, anyway):

Plato...argues...that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives their account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives their account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them.

I appreciate Plato's appeal to the instructor: If real knowledge is based on constant universal truths and unaffected by individual sense-impressions, the process of imparting knowledge suddenly become much more efficient.  As an instructor, all I have to do is tell you what you need to know.  And I can tell everyone the exact same thing.

But that model is much less useful in a field where there are few (if any) universal truths, which is the case in my areas of expertise: executive coaching, leadership development and group facilitation.  I can't tell anyone anything and have confidence that real learning will occur.  I can disclose my own sense-impressions, but the choice to view them as relevant and meaningful remains in the hands of the learner.  Ultimately all I can do as an instructor is act on hunches, ask questions, and make observations, and hope they register with the learner as lasting sense-impressions and that the learner infuses them with meaning.  And that meaning must be created out of their own, personal experiences as a leader or in a group.

I don't want to overstate the case against Platonic ideals; after all, I propose pseudo-universal truths all the time with the intention of using them as teaching tools.  But I realize that the map is not the territory, and the purpose of these tools is simply to help us better understand and make meaning of our own sense-impressions, our own experiences.

Howard Gardner on Influence

As I continue to think further about influence and power, Howard Gardner's Changing Minds offers an extremely helpful conceptual framework, one that I see as a counterpart to Cialdini's "Weapons of Influence".  From Gardner's 2006 edition:

[W]hat...factors might cause an individual to shift his or her perspective[?]... I have identified seven factors--sometimes I'll call them levers--that could be at work in these and all cases of a change of mind...

Reason

A rational approach involves identifying of relevant factors, weighing each in turn, and making an overall assessment.  Reason can involve sheer logic, the use of analogies, or the creation of taxonomies.

Research

Complementing the use of argument is the collection of relevant data... But research need not be formal; it need only entail the identification of relevant cases and a judgment about whether they warrant a change of mind.

Resonance

Reason and research appeal to the cognitive aspects of the human mind; resonance denotes the affective component.  A view, idea or perspective resonates to the extent that it feels right to an individual, seems to fit the current situation, and convinces the person that further considerations are superfluous.

Representational Redescriptions (Redescriptions, for Short)

A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other... Particularly when it comes to matters of instruction...the potential for expressing the desired lesson in many compatible formats is crucial.

Resources and Rewards

[T]he provision of resources is an instance of positive reinforcement... Individuals are being rewarded for one course of behavior and thought rather than another.  Ultimately, however, unless the new course of thought is concordant with other criteria...it is unlikely to last beyond the provision of resources.

Real World Events

Sometimes an event occurs in the broader society that affects many individuals, not just those who are contemplating a mind change.  Examples are wars, hurricanes, terrorist attaches, economic depressions--or, on a more positive side, eras of peace and prosperity...

Resistances

[W]e develop strong view and perspectives that are resistant to change... [A] mind change is most likely to come about when the first six factors operate in consort and the resistances are relatively weak.

Taken together, Gardner's "seven levers" and Cialdini's "six weapons" form a reasonably comprehensive conceptual model of influence--the central "layer" in my Influence Pyramid.  If these models are our starting point for understanding not just how influence works but also how we as individuals can be more influential, we can then move "down" the pyramid to consider 1) our self-awareness and our impact on others and 2) our internal beliefs about power, or "up" the pyramid to 3) translate these strategic concepts into tactical tools and 4) test them empirically.

Note that by focusing on Cialdini and Gardner, I don't mean to imply that their conceptual models are the only ones worth studying, but they're the most compelling ones I've encountered to date.  (And to Gardner's comments on redescriptions above, they also both translate well into different formats--in that regard, they're even more...influential.)